Common laundry detergents are deficient in handling soil resulting from protein sources, e.g., grass; blood; or soil where the proteins are combined with oils or greases from animal or vegetable origin; or soils of heavy grease; fats or starch origin. In order to effectively remove these difficult soils, various compositions are being sold as "pre-spotters" or "pre-washes." Such compositions are applied directly to difficult stains before the normal washing process.
Current pre-spotters are generally formulated with high concentration of surfactants required to obtain good cleaning. Due to possible environmental concerns and costs relating to the use of certain surfactants, there is a need to reduce the surfactant content in cleaning compositions. However, it has proven difficult for the industry to formulate cleaning compositions with reduced surfactant content which maintain the cleaning efficacy of current pre-spotters and which also possess other desired properties such as optimal viscosity, fragrance and ease of use.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a laundry pre-spotter composition having a low surfactant content which exhibits equivalent cleaning performance of compositions having significantly higher amounts of surfactants.
It is a further objective of the invention to provide a laundry pre-spotter composition that is easy to use with sufficient thickness so that it will remain on the stained area before laundering.